FastSupport.com is a Scam!

Tags

Facebook, FastSupport.com, Hacker, Scam

One day I logged into my Facebook account to find it has been disabled. Someone had reported my identity as fake and as a result Facebook requested a copy of my ID to prove I was, me.

I sent them my driver’s license. Easy enough, right? Of course not. It’s Facebook we are talking here.

So about 24 hours later they write me back and ask me for more proof.

This time I sent them the first page of my latest bank statement, which included my name and address, a copy of my social security card and a copy of my health insurance card which included my date of birth, which had to match the name and date of birth on my account.

About 24 hours later they write me back, with the exact letter they sent me 24 hours prior, as if I hadn’t just sent them 3 more forms of ID. Forms of ID mind you that they asked for (they provide you a list of what kinds of additional ID they want from you).

So this time I sent them a copy of my vehicle insurance card from Progressive.

The next day I tried to Google out a number for Facebook. I found some web page that gave me a 1-800 number for Facebook tech support. Within a few seconds I was on the phone with someone who said they were Facebook tech support and I told them my problem.

They wanted to connect to my account and asked me to go to FastSupport.com. I did and they connected to my computer remotely.

He opened up Facebook and as it had said before, it said …

Thanks for providing your ID

Thanks for your patience as we work to verify this account. We’ll email you as soon as we’ve reviewed your ID.

The next thing he did was go to the command prompt and enter my email address. The thing of it is, you can’t access your gmail account from the dos command prompt. So next he ran the tree command, listing off every directly in my computer. It does nothing more than just display every directory on your drive.

He starts to talk about how someone from Las Vegas has access to my email and has hijacked my account.

Somehow magically when the tree command finished displaying all the directories on my computer he came up with a message telling me that very thing.

Funny thing is, I know just enough about computers to know that isn’t possible to get that sort of message. He would have had to type it in copy and paste it at the cmd line for it to display that message.

Long story short, to fix my poor hijacked computer, I would need to pay him $300. I asked him what this had to do with my Facebook account and he said we can’t fix that problem over the phone, even though previously he had said that’s why he wanted to connect to my computer, so that I didn’t need to upload my ids, he could verify it remotely.

No he can’t do that. But he can fix my “hacked computer” for only $300.

Long story short, don’t fall for the FastSupport.com scam. They are not the official support number for Facebook.

 

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Do you Fiverr?

Tags

$5, Fiverr, Fraud, Scam

Years ago I wrote an article about Fiverr. Since it’s almost 3 years I thought it would be a good time to revisit the subject matter. Fiverr has grown tremendously in that time, but have things gotten any better?

Well, yes and no.

Nowadays the site has far more to offer in terms of services starting at $5. If you can think about it, you can probably find it at Fiverr.

There’s a guy from China who will draw adorable little pictures of your pets.

A guy Germany will translate your English into German.

There honestly is so much I could go on for days just listing all the crazy things you can find on Fiverr.

There are really a lot of great things about the site. But there is still a dark side. The more popular the site becomes, the worse the fraud seems to be.

Some things aren’t really so bad – as long as you pay attention.

Like the guys who claim they will provide SEO for your website for $5. But once you read the fine print you see they actually don’t provide any real work on your website. For your $5 they simply provide you a report about what is bad about your site. Basically they run your domain through some automated script who kicks back a basic report suggesting things you need to do to improve your SEO.

The thing of it is, you already know your SEO sucks. Which is why you wanted to hire someone to fix it in the first place. Why pay someone to tell you what you already know? LOL

But if you take your time and read the job description fully you should be able to catch things like that. I would say that more than 40% of all jobs on Fiverr are like this. The headlines will be very misleading and when you actually read the description you find out it’s not really quite that.

But what about other not so obvious fraud?

That unfortunately is quite common as well.

Here are some things you can look for to avoid ….

The Fake Tweet

If anyone offers to tweet anything for you because they have a TON of followers you are probably getting spammed because unless they are well known chances are they bought their followers so they are all fake. So in other words you are paying $5 to tweet to a bunch of fake people.

The Pre-Written Story

This one is rare but it does come up.  Basically someone offers to sell you a pre-written story they have of some kind. It can be any genre and typically they charge either $5 for the whole story (if it’s short) or $5 per chapter for longer ones.

You can pretty much better that the story in question is something they stole from some website. Once you get the story and start Googling random sentences from it, you’ll quickly see how you got screwed. If this happens to you remember you have only 3 days to file a fraud report with Fiverr and get your money back. Anything longer than that and you’ll find Fiverr won’t help you because they’ve already paid the guy and the guy in question took off with the money.

Social Media Fans and Friends

You want more followers on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram? At Fiverr some of the sellers promise you just that and they will even promise them to be real and permanent. As great as the offer sounds, you’ll almost always find that every single follower you buy will go away over the next few weeks or months. So say you buy 1,000 new Facebook likes. You’ll get them, of course – they want to be paid. But within the next 6 weeks you’ll find that most of those likes you paid for magically disappeared. Long story short – Fiverr isn’t a great place to buy social media fans and followers.

 The Fake Book Editor

You write something great but it needs to be edited. You go to Fiverr and hire a professional – or so you think. Editors at Fiverr typically charge $5 for 500 to 1,500 words. It sounds like a good deal but in the end, it’s almost never worth it. You submit your story and get it back only to find that they did a half ass job. Sure they catch about half of the edits but more often than not, your Fiverr editor isn’t going to provide you with all the edits your book needs to be published.

If you happen to fall victim to anything shady at Fiverr just remember to immediately contact Fiverr customer service. Don’t wait because there is only a short and I mean very short time (usually 3 days) that they can do anything about it.

Fiverr can be a great resource for those who are careful, take their time and are willing to quickly act when they find out they are a victim of fraud.